Thursday, July 7, 2016

Obama struggles to convince "his own party" that his massive free trade deals like TPP will help Americans. Democrat Rep. Louise Slaughter, in congress since 1987, says they don't, never have: 'In all the time I've been in Congress, I've never seen a trade bill that benefited the American producer or the American worker. It's been all give-away'-Politico, Feb. 2014

The pressure is building as the administration’s top trade
negotiators head to Singapore for meetings this week, where they’ll try
to break the remaining impasses and finish the deal, and the White House
lobbies Congress for the authority to “fast-track” the agreement to a
vote without amendments.

A big piece of Obama’s legacy depends on his administration’s
success on those items: Will he be the president who remade the free
trade mold, for better or worse, or will political opposition leave his
efforts to drift, unresolved? Before meeting with Mexican President Pena Nieto on Wednesday, Obama
touted the pan-Pacific deal as an “opportunity to open up new markets
in the fastest, most populous region of the world – the Asia Pacific
region.”

Part of Obama’s public relations problem is that the Pacific trade
talks have run up against an obstacle in Japan. Tokyo is balking at
North American calls to drop its agricultural tariffs, and trade experts
say that’s causing a chain reaction among other countries, which are
holding back on making their own concessions while they wait to see what
happens.

As a result, chapters on issues important to the Obama
administration, such as labor, environmental and intellectual property
protections covering everything from pharmaceutical patents to movie and
music copyrighting, must still be sorted out. So the discussion has focused on the more tangible questions of
market access: Will U.S. sugar growers have to give up quotas that block
Australian imports? Will Nike win a victory over New England-based New
Balance and be allowed to make more shoes in Vietnam? Those debates
sound the same now as they did when NAFTA was negotiated.

Administration officials defended Obama’s credibility, saying the
president has already scored some successes in his quest for a new
high-standard take on trade....

The president’s position, Froman said, was influential as world
leaders decided to refocus their long-foundering efforts to ink a “Doha
round” deal at the World Trade Organization. Members instead worked on a
trade facilitation agreement, which they completed in December, that is
expected to boost developing countries’ exports.

“The entire membership of the WTO struck its first multilateral
agreement in the organization’s history, and President Obama’s early
vision for a break with old ways of approaching trade had a lot to do
with that,” Froman said.

Meanwhile, outside the WTO’s walls in Geneva, the United States is
involved in global talks to expand trade in services, information
technology and “green” energy products. Those deals involve dozens of
countries and could eventually be adopted by the full WTO.